The Way God Works

God works in mysterious ways;

We must not fight against this in action or say.

We must build upon the gifts sent us today.

Tomorrow may enable us somewhat to alter the route,

Upon which all are careering down, hoping to make out.

Alienation

Sixty or more years ago there was much egghead lamenting about being alienated from humanity about one. I believe that that whole angle was off-target and irrelevant. Alienation existed and was a real problem, but its properties were ill-defined and misidentified, making it impossible to write about the subject in any helpful way.

Each person, leading a collectivist life, is alienated from those around her. She is lonely in the crowd.

But far more significantly, as a collectivist exister, she is alienated from herself. That is the only important issue regarding alienation as a state of being. Only as an individuator existent, can she cause alienation from herself to dissolve and disappear. Right-living makes it a non-issue.

Paradoxically, as she becomes attuned to the rhythms of her own existence, she is self-harmonized. Only the self-harmonized individual becomes less alienated towards other s around her.

If she is quite free and developed, but another is group-enslaved and modestly developed, that other is a dishonest person, alienated from others and himself. The developed woman in question will remain somewhat alienated from him for his inauthentic existence robs them both of an honest, rewarding connection.

She is no longer alienated from herself and her communal alienation from another increasingly withers away as the other in question leads a more free and developed life, much reducing his alienation from God, himself and her, the authentic exister and non-alienated winner.

Take the First Step

You are incurious to discovering why you were put here on earth, and to what is the proper response to uncovering why you are here. You are incurious because you have not yet come alive. Turn on that psychic switch and let in an infusion of light. Clear away the cobwebs and commence pondering.

God put you here on earth to do your duty to De. Your first obligation is to select the duty to be performed. Your second obligation, imposed upon you by the Higher Power, is to spend the remainder of your life fulfilling that duty.

Your duty to God is to live and act in God’s image and light. God is the Great Creator. You are to make your mark as one of billions of mini-creators following your personalized path to self-realization. All are called but only a few ever bother to try, let alone work at it much beyond a feeble, youthful attempt that soon withers away to mediocre surviving. By actualizing your potentiality, you magnify the gifts that God has given you, and you send them right back to a smiling Deity receiving your gift as you help extend the reach of De’s domain. By actualizing your potentiality, you will have made the world a little better and a little more beautiful. At life’s end, that would not be a poor epitaph for inscribing upon your tombstone: “She made the world a little better and a little more beautiful.”

Throw off your excuses. Shed your body of the garments of alibis. Detach yourself from the ready, shabby justification that group identity is destiny. You are a separate, unique person. If you have just been released from Folsum Prison after serving a 17-year term for molesting children, it does not matter. If you are a 38-year-old accountant and mother, decent but otherwise unremarkable, it does not matter.

Your personal story, your personal ethnic identification, your inherited value system, none of these crutches ultimately matter. Throw them off, rise and walk. The journey of a thousand miles begins with this first step. Your background is your foundation to build upon. Your story informs your actualization process. Grounded in its peculiar orientation to the world, it will inform your personal narration, and that will be your gift back to God and to the world.

If you are an elderly bachelor that drifted through life, never hurting anybody but never helping anyone either, it does not matter. From today on, for the rest of your life, for the few years that you have left, you will self-realize as well and as completely as you can. God will forgive any sincere sinner. There is always hope. Redemption is available right away should you ask to receive it, and work steadily and calmly to live and die as the mini-creator that God anticipated that you could become should you endeavor to try.

Move on. Move forward. Develop. Grow in love, skill, knowledge and wisdom. The past is your base, not an insurmountable barricade. No longer allow your obsessing, about this base from whence you sprang, defeat you. Deny not your base history or repudiate it. Celebrate it as it is. Embrace it but move on. Build on it. Reflect. Gain insight from your experience. Move forward and upward.